[Slackbuilds-users] Is Ekiga being phased out of SBo

[Dave Woodfall]

On 22/02/22 16:10,
Sebastian Arcus <s.arcus at open-t.co.uk> put forth the proposition:
> On 22/02/2022 15:38, Dave Woodfall wrote:
> > On 22/02/22 13:27,
> > Sebastian Arcus <s.arcus at open-t.co.uk> put forth the proposition:
> > > I haven't been able to get Ekiga to work any more since end of March 2021
> > > after updating this machine to latest -current (at the time). I eventually
> > > managed to get it compiled and installed, but then when trying to connect to
> > > any sip account it crashes.
> > > When trying to recompile it now I noticed that ponce's SBo git repo now
> > > doesn't have Ekiga or Opal any more. Do I take it that Ekiga is now being
> > > phased out from SBo? I guess it makes sense as the upstream code hasn't been
> > > updated for a few years.
> > > I would be ok with switching to another SIP client - but haven't found any
> > > so far which actually work properly. Linphone installs fine, but when I try
> > > to add a SIP account, it just doesn't do it. No error, nothing.
> > > Any suggestions for a SIP client, or how to get Ekiga to work again please?
> > > I would prefer a client which supports multiple accounts - but frankly at
> > > this stage I would try anything. Thank you.
> Hi David,
> >
> > Hi Sebastian
> >
> > I have been down this road in the past too, and was surprised at the
> > lack of a good software phone that had any kind of contacts list, or
> > didn't they didn't support basic things like contact groups.
> >
> > I found Ekiga to be the most user-friendly phone out there (if you
> > can get past some of the cryptic error messages), which is why I
> > began maintaining it, but now I use a hardware VOIP phone + local
> > asterisk PBX.
> I found Ekiga reasonably good as well - until it stopped working. I actually
> use myself VoIP desk phone (mainly Grandstream and old Cisco stuff) +
> Asterisk PBX's at a number of sites. But I need a VoIP softphone on my
> laptop to troubleshoot and reconfigure remotely Asterisk servers.
> >
> > Unfortunately, the developers stopped working on Ekiga many years
> > ago.  The problem now is that one of the dependencies fails to build
> > in 15.0, which renders it useless.  Linphone is probably the most,
> > maybe only, maintained software phone at the moment, and has been
> > getting better over the years.
> I've just about managed to get Linphone working now. The trouble was that it
> expects a specific syntax when configuring a sip account (username in the
> format <sip: username at server>, and the proxy address needs to start with
> "sip:" as well) - but there were zero error messages in the GUI if you
> didn't follow that syntax - it just didn't add the account - so I was
> flummoxed for a while.
> Thank you everyone for the suggestions. I plan to have a look at Twinkle and
> see if it will compile and install.

I used to use the CLI part of linphone for testing things: linphonec.
You may find the errors and warnings bit more verbose than the GUI,
but it worked fine.  I can't recall if it takes SIP address as a flag
when starting it though, which would be useful.  IIRC the syntax
it uses is sip:user/extension@<ip address>.  It keeps history between
sessions, so you only need to up-arrow a few times the next time you
use it.

--
Dave